Privacy Changes Coming to Facebook Groups

September 15 2019

Facebook, one of the largest social media platforms in the world, is one of the best tools you can use as a real estate agent. It offers endless opportunities for you to engage with potential buyers. One of those opportunities, Facebook Groups, enables you to create a group that can be targeted to a specific location or audience.

While Facebook Groups are great, there are some upcoming changes that may impact the success of these groups. To get you ahead of the changes, we outlined them and how they may impact how you use groups for your business.

The Current Types of Groups

Currently, Facebook allows three different types of groups: Public, Private, and Secret. Public groups are open for anyone to join without approval from a group admin. Private groups require the approval of an admin, and Secret groups are hidden from the public and require an invitation from an admin or moderator for the group.

Changes that Are Coming

Recently, Facebook announced that changes would be coming to Facebook Groups as part of The Safe Communities Initiative. With this, there will be several changes that will affect the naming and privacy settings of Facebook Groups.

When the changes take effect, Facebook will be removing the "Secret" group option and will only have the Public and Private options. While there will no longer be a secret group option, group admins will still have the option to choose if the group will be visible in search results.

This change will be implemented in an effort to monitor users who are classified as "bad actors." These are people who may pose a threat to members of the Facebook community by posting dangerous or threatening content.

The privacy changes will also continue to allow group admins to closely monitor the members who are in the group or are requesting to join the group.

How These Changes Affect Your Groups

In a blog post on the Facebook Newsroom by Facebook's VP of Engineering, Tom Alison, the changes are being made to make groups safer by monitoring the content that is being posted and continuing to monitor users of the Facebook platform to determine if they are creating groups that are spammers, hackers, or trolls.

These changes will help you keep your group's community as safe as possible. It will also help keep out fake accounts that attempt to join the group in an effort to create issues for the community in the group.

There are endless opportunities for engagement and exposure when you create a Facebook Group. Facebook is a great way for you to reach new clients, but it can take a lot of time to nurture your social media presence and create groups with a targeted audience.